


The Tale of the Woman with Three Mirrors

by orelseatlastsheunderstoodit



Series: My Doctor Who Meta [10]
Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen, Meta, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-17
Updated: 2017-09-17
Packaged: 2019-07-05 14:17:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15865293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orelseatlastsheunderstoodit/pseuds/orelseatlastsheunderstoodit
Summary: Meta originally written for101 Claras to See.





	1. The First Mirror

Clara’s three mirrors from Series 8 has always intrigued me. Oh, I understand their functional purpose, for makeup and the like, but the fact that her reflection is split in three is what intrigues me the most. Clara Oswald has three distinct phases to her self that emerge from viewing her run on  _Doctor Who_ , and, throughout it all, Clara is striving, like Tennyson’s Ulysses, for more than what she has.

**Fairytale Heroine**

Once upon a time, Clara Oswald made a phone call.

Clara’s story starts out in Series 7 with her away from home. Certainly the Maitland home is no Troy; no burnt ships keep her from the place she left behind. Instead, it’s her sense of obligation and responsibility and her regard for the Maitlands that keeps her anchored to one place. But Clara, responsible as she is, doesn’t want to stay around forever—she wants to see the 101 places that are in her book.

Perhaps she identifies with Tennyson’s Ulysses, who is clearly chafing under the responsibilities and obligations of being a king:

> _It little profits that an idle king,_
> 
> _By this still hearth, among these barren crags,_
> 
> _Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole_
> 
> _Unequal laws unto a savage race,_
> 
> _That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me._

As with all fairytales, Clara’s tale starts off with the obscured heroine immersed in the mundanities of regular life. Of course, Angie and Artie clearly  _aren’t_  savages, but they  _are_  kids and Clara, idling between university life and whatever being an adult has in store for her, has tasked herself with caring for them. Their world includes only those facets of Clara that Clara lets them see (until they press Clara for details on her ‘boyfriend’). Angie and Artie don’t know Clara like her gran does, or how her friends from university knew her. If they see Clara at all, they merely see her as Mom’s friend, or as Clara their nanny.

So time passes, and it seems more and more likely that Clara will finish out her time between school and work, between her adolescence and her adulthood, with still being responsible, still meeting her obligations, still keeping up the appearances of being “the boss”, still being the woman wanting the adventure and yet feeling bound to her duties.

Granted, this is Clara’s choice—no one coerced her or forced her to stay with the Maitlands. It’s her compassion that compels her to stay and help and it’s her responsibility that restrains her from being the heroine that she feels deep down that she is.

At some point the woman in the shop gives Clara the TARDIS phone number. We don’t see this happen on screen, and Clara doesn’t know it’s for the TARDIS, and the audience nor Clara know that the woman is actually Missy until the end of Series 8, but it happens.

And then the journey truly begins:

Clara finds out that the world is bigger than she hoped and she ends up seeing more of it than she’d planned. She’s tentative and wary at first (as any fairly inexperienced traveler in the land of Faery would be), and says, “Come back tomorrow.” Why,  “Because tomorrow I might say yes.”

Faery is fascinating, but Clara knows her stories and she knows that it’s perilous as well. So she rather healthily sets limits and only travels with the Doctor on Wednesdays. Granted, due to him having a time machine, it’s pretty much always Wednesday for the Doctor, but he respects (well, as much as the Doctor respects anything) the fact that she wants to keep one foot squarely planted on  _terra firma_.

Clara’s journeys through Faery are both full of wonder and danger. She saves a little girl in red (from a memory-eating planet, not a big bad wolf). Like the Beauty in Beast’s castle, like any Gothic heroine, she finds her way to forbidden knowledge (even if a big friendly button technically wipes what happened out of existence and memory) and the Beast snarls in panic and pain and fear over whoever she is. And she finds out that she’s been in (and died in) places where she’s never been and where she’s certainly never died (but she forgets that too).

But “[s]he’s just a girl,” Emma tells the Doctor in “Hide.” “She’s a perfectly ordinary girl. Very pretty, very clever, more scared than she lets on.”

And the Doctor finally figures this out, or at least fully accepts it—that Clara is “just Clara” as he says to her in “Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS”–when the Great Intelligence kidnaps Jenny, Vastra, and Strax and attacks the Doctor’s timeline. No one in that TARDIS control room, all overgrown with vines, has any control of the situation, except for Clara Oswald. Not the Doctor, who’s writhing on the floor. Not River, who’s a data ghost. Not Vastra, whose grief has overrun her usually cool logic. Just Clara.

And Clara, the twenty-first-century, perfectly normal girl, saves the day. She takes her knowledge of stories and uses that to fix the Doctor’s fracturing timeline. Clara writes herself into the background of every fairy tale the Doctor’s appeared in, secretly making things right, nudging or motivating the Doctor in the direction he had always gone in. It’s spending a year making soufflés and fighting off Daleks with opera music. It’s being born behind Big Ben and inventing fish and saving children from their nightmares. She writes herself the role of fairytale heroine and places herself in the Doctor’s narrative. Clara makes her echoes more brilliant and more brave and more bold than she feels she is in her everyday life.

But Clara isn’t her echoes. She is not a fairytale heroine, even if Clara even gets an offer of marriage from an emperor. She turns the offer down because that’s not the ending of her story. After all, Clara doesn’t want to be a queen. Like Ulysses, she has no desire to stay in one place and rule over people who don’t see or know her. Her story is still not done, and she knows it. Traveling with the Doctor is a fun excursion from her ordinary life of daily duties; it’s a trip into Faery, full of peril and mystery and story. It’s not her job or her life; it’s, as she’ll tell the Doctor, her  _hobby_.

But what  _does_  Clara want to be known as?


	2. The Second Mirror

As we saw, the First Mirror reflects a Clara in Series 7, yearning for adventure and finding it, creating fairytale heroines out of herself. But she herself is not one…so what or who  _does_  Clara want to be known as?

**English Teacher By Day, Heroine By Whenever It Is**

In Series 8, Clara has become more certain of herself and of who she means to be. But there’s two parts of herself that she cannot choose between: regular English teacher or Doctor’s companion. Both lives are important to her; she loves kids and she loves to see them learn, but she also loves the adventure and, yes, the adrenaline of her travels with the Doctor.

Clara thought she would die upon leaping into the Doctor’s tortured timestream, but she didn’t. And so it seems that somewhere in the time vortex, between leaving Trenzalore in a lurching TARDIS, landing in the 1890s, and receiving a phone call in Scotland from Trenzalore, she decides that she can keep traveling with the Doctor. Though it does seem as if she’s taken off the training wheels and thrown away the “Only on Wednesdays” rule that she had imposed on her travels.

Ulysses was much the same after returning from his initial travels. He says, in Tennyson’s poem:

> _I cannot rest from travel: I will drink_
> 
> _Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy’d_
> 
> _Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those_
> 
> _That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when_
> 
> _Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades_
> 
> _Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;_
> 
> _For always roaming with a hungry heart_
> 
> _Much have I seen and known; cities of men_
> 
> _And manners, climates, councils, governments,_
> 
> _Myself not least, but honour’d of them all;_
> 
> _And drunk delight of battle with my peers,_
> 
> _Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy._

Clara has also seen and known much—the universe is far broader, stranger, wondrous, than she perhaps initially imagined. She’s done heroic things—talked down a martial Martian with the idea of loved ones, fixed the Doctor’s timeline, and sparked the saving of Gallifrey with unshed tears and a subtle shake of her head. She’s had a chance to stand up for people, save cities, protect planets, to expand beyond where she started. She loves her adventures with the Doctor, but she also loves coming back to her students and teaching them the importance of stories and of well-placed words.

Of course, this bifurcated life is complicated when she meets and falls in love with her fellow teacher, Danny Pink. Danny’s the kind of man who’ll make a woman breakfast and put thought into every present he gives. He’s good with children and looks out for others. He’s got pain and guilt informing his compassion and insecurities behind his defenses. He sees wonder in children learning and nights in and lives simply lived in peace. He’s had enough of peril to last him several lifetimes. And he loves Clara, and Clara loves him back.

But he doesn’t do “weird” and Clara’s life is definitely weird. Danny is firmly connected to the planet and the people he loves. And Clara’s been knocked around by life just enough to be afraid of expressing that she loves him, but that her life is weird (that her best friend is a two-hearted alien who travels in time and space).

So Clara strives to keep her two lives apart, but they keep colliding. The Doctor ends up at Coal Hill School, he interrupts her date with Danny (and asks about checking on his prospects for her), and they end up in Danny’s past (and the Doctor’s).

Clara exclaims to her mirrors that she’s “got it all under control” but she really really doesn’t. The self-proclaimed bossy control freak is losing control and she responds by lying about it. Even though when Danny finds out about her weird world, he adjusts his views on the weird in her life because he loves her so much. He merely wants her to be honest about it.

Yet she lies to Danny about stopping her travels, she lies to the Doctor about it being Danny who wanted her to stop, and she lies to herself about her own motivations and aspirations. She doesn’t actually want to stop traveling and she doesn’t want to give Danny up.

Danny calls her on her dishonesty and asks for her to be honest, which, honestly, is only fair (and the right thing in a healthy relationship). After all, Clara thinks, she risks herself in all her adventures—that’s easier, in a way, than being emotionally vulnerable when you can’t control another’s reactions—and she decides to risk it.

And never gets to follow through.

> _I am a part of all that I have met;_
> 
> _Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’_
> 
> _Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades_
> 
> _For ever and forever when I move._

Danny is killed in one of the most mundane ways possible, and something shifts in Clara. Her weird life is no longer merely a hobby, but a way to bring the beloved dead back to life. After all, they do the impossible all the time, right? That’s what they do, right? She’s the Impossible Girl, the heroine of a thousand thousand stories, right? Doesn’t the universe owe her an impossible something?

But, as the Doctor could have told her, the universe is rarely fair to the person who regularly saves it. So while the weird world literally leaks its way into the mundane reality of a schoolteacher’s life and brings him back from the dead, it’s not fairytale-esque. No, it’s more of a horrific twist on a fairytale, where, after saving his beloved (and, coincidentally, the world), the steadfast tin soldier melts himself due to his compassion.

And Clara Oswald is never the same. Her mother’s death affected her deeply, but Danny’s death makes her acutely aware of that “untravell’d world”, be it a nothingness, Missy’s Nethersphere, or something she can’t yet imagine.

Perhaps Clara can’t imagine being a fairytale heroine ever again, or enjoying a happily ever after, not after everything that’s happened. She can be an English teacher at Coal Hill School and a consultant for UNIT. She can miss Danny for five minutes a day but move the hell on with her life. But in between those lines, who is Clara?


	3. The Third Mirror

In the first mirror, we saw Clara compose herself into a thousand thousand fairytale heroines. In the second, we saw her try to balance the two halves of her weird and wonderful life and it falling to pieces and Clara redrawing the boundaries of her life. But in between the lines she’s drawn,  _who_  is Clara? Who or what does she decide to be?

**Doctor Oswald**

Clara and the Doctor come to a place where they try to be honest with each other; it takes brain-sucking aliens and Santa Claus to force the issue, but it happens. And Clara finds something else to be.

She decides that she’ll be the Doctor. Oh, she’d always had it in her (it’s why Missy picked her out, after all, and pushed her toward the Doctor). She’d threatened Emma and the TARDIS over opening and traveling to the pocket universe, she’d commanded a platoon of soldiers on Hedgewick’s World, and she’d playfully called herself “The Doctor” when the Doctor was trapped inside the dimension-leeched TARDIS.

But now? Now Clara has someone else to be. She says as much in Series 9; she tells the Doctor to break his rules because he owes her. She says, “You’ve given me something else to, to be” and she means it. She’ll be the Doctor, with all the riskiness and recklessness and ridiculous escapes that that role implies.

> _How dull it is to pause, to make an end,_
> 
> _To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!_
> 
> _As tho’ to breathe were life! Life piled on life_
> 
> _Were all too little, and of one to me_
> 
> _Little remains: but every hour is saved_
> 
> _From that eternal silence, something more,_
> 
> _A bringer of new things; and vile it were_
> 
> _For some three suns to store and hoard myself,_
> 
> _And this gray spirit yearning in desire_
> 
> _To follow knowledge like a sinking star,_
> 
> _Beyond the utmost bound of human thought._

Like Ulysses, one life isn’t enough for Clara (and the million or so echoes she wrote for herself do not count). She wants more—to  _be_ more, to  _do_  more, to  _see_  more. She owns her flaws—she tells Bonnie that she’s an excellent liar and has no shame about it, she follows Missy and asks for her own pointy stick, and she’s not going to let anyone stand in her way. Clara is determined not to pause or to rust unburnish’d or to fade into dull obscurity.

This determination catches up with her, in a Time-Lord set trap for the Doctor. Clara had once seen the Doctor take on a young woman’s anguish and pain in order to beat the mummy, risking his own life to save the woman’s. “Sometimes the only choices you have are bad ones,” the Doctor had said, after they’d just escaped from the space-train. “But you still have to choose.”

That’s what Clara does: she chooses to take on a young man’s death sentence in order to save him and to save his family from the pain of a lost loved one. It’s what the Doctor would do, it’s what the Doctor has done, and it’s what Clara (acting as the Doctor) did.

But there was a twist to the story, and the hero’s sacrifice could not be circumvented (to any of their knowledge).

And Clara faced the raven.

>          _This is my son, mine own Telemachus,_
> 
> _To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,—_
> 
> _Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil_
> 
> _This labour, by slow prudence to make mild_
> 
> _A rugged people, and thro’ soft degrees_
> 
> _Subdue them to the useful and the good._
> 
> _Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere_
> 
> _Of common duties, decent not to fail_
> 
> _In offices of tenderness, and pay_
> 
> _Meet adoration to my household gods,_
> 
> _When I am gone. He works his work, I mine._

Clara’s death gutted me, as I am sure it did her family and her friends and her students. She left behind her father (who’s now lost his wife  _and_  his daughter) and her gran. She left behind the Maitlands and her friends from university. She left behind Courtney and Maeve and all the other students at Coal Hill School.

She leaves Rigsy, whom she didn’t blame for her death, behind to tell the story of the woman who sacrificed her life for his, to tell her family that she died doing good and that she was brave in facing her death.

Clara is no different from anyone else in that her life affected others. But I suspect that Clara Oswald was a tidal wave rather than a ripple, and people didn’t know it until she’d passed the bar and headed out to the untravell’d world.

>          _There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:_
> 
> _There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,_
> 
> _Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me—_
> 
> _That ever with a frolic welcome took_
> 
> _The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed_
> 
> _Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;_
> 
> _Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;_
> 
> _Death closes all: but something ere the end,_
> 
> _Some work of noble note, may yet be done,_
> 
> _Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods._
> 
> _The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:_
> 
> _The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep_
> 
> _Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,_
> 
> _’T is not too late to seek a newer world._
> 
> _Push off, and sitting well in order smite_
> 
> _The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds_
> 
> _To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths_
> 
> _Of all the western stars, until I die._
> 
> _It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:_
> 
> _It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,_
> 
> _And see the great Achilles, whom we knew._

Some noble work may yet be done ere the end of Clara’s story, not unbecoming a woman who strove with Time Lords, who scolded the General and Ohila and who told them what I wished I could have told them.

Clara is ostensibly pulled from her timeline to help the Doctor help the Time Lords with the Hybrid. She’s pulled from the untravell’d world into a world equally untraveled.

And despite the Doctor’s wishes and actions, her heart had not restarted and her tattoo is stuck at triple zero. But she keeps her memories. She subverts Donna’s ending and transcends it.

Her heart won’t restart because her death is a fixed point—but is it a fixed point simply because she died so long before she was pulled out, or is her death a fixed point because of the good that she and Me do throughout time and space? The narrative doesn’t say, but I’d put my money on the latter.

Now Clara has a TARDIS and her very own companion. And she’s traveling through time and space, saving planets and peoples, caught in the space between two heartbeats. Clara and her adventures have become akin to a Greek epic—to the story of Ulysses himself, perhaps, wandering from place to place and having adventures. “’T is not too late to seek a newer world,” Ulysses says in Tennyson’s poem, and Clara, I think, would agree.

> _Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’_
> 
> _We are not now that strength which in old days_
> 
> _Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;_
> 
> _One equal temper of heroic hearts,_
> 
> _Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will_
> 
> _To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield._

Bereft of her family and her homeworld and her very heartbeat, Clara still abides. No longer a fairytale heroine, an English teacher, or a UNIT consultant, Clara Oswald becomes a figure of an epic legend, taking her place with the Beowulfs, the Redcross Knights, the Robin Hoods, the Ulysseses, and, yes, the Doctors of literature.

In fact, Clara already seems to have chosen the promise of her name. She tells Robin Hood, her childhood favorite legendary hero: “Don’t give up. Not ever. Not for one single day. Be safe, if you can be. But always be amazing.”

Clara is clinically dead and yet impossibly alive—she is not that strength that she was, but she is Clara Oswald. Clara—strong-willed, full of agency and compassion and memory—purposes to live a breathless yet triumphant life of adventure with Me (and perhaps with other companions along the way).

But, unlike Ulysses, Clara has already sailed beyond the sunset, past the Happy Isles, and yet is still striving, still seeking, still finding, and will not yield until she decides to yield. Then, and only then, she’ll be going back to Gallifrey. That’s her final destination, after all. But, until then, she’s taking the long way round and leaving stories about her in her wake.

May her stories never end.


End file.
